We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Various forms of coercion, such as designation of the application process for identity documents issued by UK Ministers (e.g passports), are an option to stimulate applications in a manageable way. Designation should be considered as part of a managed roll-out strategy, specifically in relation to UK documents. There are advantages to designation of documents associated with particular target groups e.g. young people who may be applying for their first Driving Licence.
– ‘National Identity Scheme, Options Analysis – Outcome’, the Home Office document from the end of 2007 that succinctly describes its approach to the imposition of the national identity scheme onto the population.
The new Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, says “Holding an identity card should be a personal choice for British citizens — just as it is now to obtain a passport.” This is no change. It always has been intended that it should become the same personal choice, that any application for a passport (or another official document that you need to live a normal life) should entail an application to be on the national register for the rest of your life. As voluntary as sleeping.
…says the person calling himself the Right Honourable Alan Johnson MP.
Amusing comments.
The Times, assisted by Mr Justice Eady, who seems to preside over the whole mess that stands in the place of proper privacy law in England, has unmasked the police blogger NightJack. NightJack had just won the Orwell Prize for his blog. I am guessing that drew it to the attention of higher authority, and such articulate dissent must be punished.
It took just six weeks, including a court-case, to reveal his identity. The blog has now been deleted, and the DC formerly known as NightJack has been disciplined in some unspecified way. Apparently it is in the public interest to maintain a disciplinary code under which police officers are not permitted to express their opinions. That is what Sir David Eady implied, obiter, in giving his judgement.
But deleting from public knowledge what has once been on the web is difficult. Here is a celebrated sample, NightJack’s advice to the arrested, which Samizdata readers may find both useful and enlightening (there is a situational irony in the sideswipe at those who have learned how to use the forces of law and order to score points and extract revenge):
A Survival Guide for Decent Folk
Paul has posted a number of lengthy replies on the “Modest Proposal” thread. In these days of us increasingly having to deal with law abiding folk who have fallen foul of the “entitled poor” and those who have learned how to use us to score points and exact revenge, I thought it would be a good idea to give out a bit of general guidance for those law abiding types who find themselves under suspicion or under arrest. It works for the bad guys so make it work for you.
→ Continue reading: Public service
[I]n much the same way that political control of statistical data can grant the holder control over the policy agenda, so control of an individual’s personal and sensitive information can grant dominance over the individual himself. It is precisely this that, in the information age, makes identity theft such a harrowing crime: the dual sensations of violation and helplessness arising from a realisation that one is no longer in control of one’s own life. The fact of the matter is that our personal and sensitive data are the core statistics of our own unique lives and, by extension, the wholesale collection, retention and sharing of our data by government is equivalent to a state-sponsored and thereby legitimised form of identity theft.
– The Earl of Northesk
What the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four could never have predicted is that the citizens would subject themselves to the scrutiny of the cameras voluntarily. The deeper threat to human dignity in 2009 is not state surveillance but pathological exhibitionism. In so many respects, what Orwell foretold has come to pass — with the crucial difference that it has been embraced by consumers not imposed upon them by the totalitarian state.
– The Spectator.
I posted this item almost as Brian hit the button on his own entry on the same subject. But I think it is worth a second bite at this cherry.
Great work by Fraser Nelson at the Spectator for revealing that Royal Bank of Scotland, which is now almost totally owned by the UK government, has been asking prospective clients about their political affiliations. The exact term is to ask whether a wannabe client is a “politically exposed person”. Now, this maybe more of a cockup than a sign of anything more sinister, so my trigger finger may be getting unnecessarily twitchy, but still. This is, as the commenters on the article Fraser writes says, a classic demonstration of why state-owned banks are bad and ripe for corruption. Special favours will be demanded by the ruling party’s clients. In France, remember, the former state-run Credit Lyonnais bank was a sink of corruption.
RBS is also the parent of Coutts, the private bank, and RBS Coutts, the international version of said. These banks provide clients with offshore accounts. The risk is that such a bank could be put under political pressure to deliver details about its clients, a fact that becomes particularly relevant with so many governments currently trying to shut down so-called “tax havens” such as Switzerland.
If it is the case that RBS has been trying to prize out details of potential clients’ political affiliations, then at the very least the management responsible for this dim-witted idea should resign. In fact, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, should serious consider his own position. On his watch, the once very solid, in fact gloriously dull, UK banking group Lloyds has been pressured into buying the debt-laden UK banking group HBOS. Result: Lloyds’ share price has crashed and most of that bank is now owned by the government. (Full disclosure: I bank with Lloyds).
Unbelievable.
Fraser Nelson:
Some of the worst events in history take place because no one is really in charge. That RBS could blunder their way into this is almost as scary as the idea that they did it deliberately. I accept it was a blunder: God knows, RBS has made enough of them already. But the banking industry should urgently review and clarify the way it handles the issue of “politically exposed persons.” No one in this country should ever again be asked about party political affiliation by their bank.
Fine prose, I think you will agree. At first I had in mind to make that first sentence there into today’s SQOTD. But think about it. To Nelson, it is obvious that nobody should “ever again be asked about party political affiliation by their bank”. Excuse me? If I am wondering whether or not to lend you money, I will ask you any questions I feel like asking, and if I don’t like the answers, then it will be no deal. If you don’t like me asking such questions, you are free to look elsewhere for the funds you want to borrow, even if I say yes. If you don’t like a bank you lend money to asking such questions, then don’t lend it to them. I am talking about the right to discriminate, both by lenders and by borrowers. Discrimination is, or should be, at the heart of banking. The attempt to drive discrimination out of banking has been at the heart of our recent banking woes.
That Fraser Nelson, a man most definitely on our side in the broad loves-capitalist-success hates-socialist-slums way that we regularly here celebrate, should write something like that, with no apparent sense of self-contradiction, tells you just how debased – how nationalised – the state of banking already is now in Britain, and has been for some while. It’s not that Nelson favours state micro-management of banks in the deliberate manner which I do agree is suggested by my heading. It’s worse than that. He just takes it for granted. His only question is: how should it be done?
Because you see, what makes this question about whether you are a “politically exposed person” scary and Soviet, which is Nelson’s point, is that the banks already are nationalised, in the sense of their databases being, you know, like that (hands brought together into a combined, intertwined, two-handed prayer fist) with government databases.
If banks operated in a true free market, banks asking about politics, or for that matter being suspected of having (and in fact having) political preferences which they make a point of not asking about, would just be stuff discussed in Which Bank? magazine. And the readers of such magazines would have plenty of banks to choose between, just as they now have plenty of magazines to choose between.
Clive Davis, who blogs at the Spectator’s Coffee House site these days, reckons the concerns that civil libertarians have about CCTVs all over the UK are “over-hyped”. Well maybe they are but it seems that Mr Davis does rather miss the point slightly. CCTV may not, of themselves, be a threat to civil liberties in the same way as some of other vast collection of laws now on the statute books in the UK, but they are not harmless in this respect, either. True, society has always had its snoops, its “nosey parkers” – as we Brits used to say – and curtain-twitching neighbours. Sometimes such vigilant folk performed a kind of public service, even if unintended, by creating a social network in which certain kinds of delinquent behaviour could be spotted and dealt with. But clearly there are costs to this in that innocent people can find their actions being picked on by the hyper-vigilant. On a more practical level, the obsession with surveillance can crowd out resources better devoted to deterring crime in other ways.
In fairness to Mr Davis, I am sure that readers can come up with any numbers of contenders for laws that are far worse than CCTV. My personal favourite is the Civil Contingencies Act, which confers on government a whopping collection of powers to use in emergencies; this act received virtually no serious press coverage in the MSM whatsoever. But CCTV, and the sheer number of them in the UK, is all of a piece of a move by this country towards a Big Brother state. Yes, if one wants to be nit-picky about it, one could argue that CCTVs in privately-owned shopping malls, for example, are not intrusive since a person is not forced to go into such places, whereas cameras in public streets for which the public has a right of access are intrusive. Also, there is the sheer, practical issue of information overload: there comes a point where there are so many cameras that it is hard to know if the police can physically track all of their photos all the time. So maybe panic is unjustified.
But I think Clive’s sang froid on this occasion is just as mistaken as screaming hysteria. We have moved decisively towards a police state in recent years and on some measures, are already in one. CCTVs are part of this state of affairs. Trying to pretend otherwise is not very credible. I am not entirely sure why Mr Davis wants to take the line he does.
As an aside, Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, who is a man not to get hysterical about anything, is fairly scathing about the recent British love affair with CCTV in his book, The Rotten State of Britain. It looks like a good read and I will review it later.
If you are a Samizdata reader, you probably don’t have a lot of use for your Member of Parliament. However, now is the time to use them – especially if you have a Labour MP.
Here is Phil Booth:
At the Convention on Modern Liberty, I launched NO2ID’s request that everyone at the convention – and around the UK – tells their MP right now that they refuse their consent to having their information shared under any “information sharing order”, a power currently being slipped onto the statute books in clause 152 of the coroners and justice bill .
Please tell yours too. It’s important, and urgent – and something that only YOU can do. If you never have before, now’s the time to write to your MP – in a letter, or via www.WriteToThem.com.
Jack Straw has been making noises that could signal a ‘compromise’, but the only acceptable action is to remove clause 152 entirely from the bill. It is not linked to any other clause, despite being sandwiched between other powers and so-called safeguards offered to the information commissioner. It cannot be improved, and Straw can’t be allowed to merely “dilute” it. Clause 152 just has to go.
It’s imperative that in coming days every MP hears from his or her constituents. Please tell them you refuse consent to having your information, taken for one purpose, arbitrarily used for any other purpose. And ask them to vote clause 152 off the bill.
If you are skeptical about whether anything is important enough to write a polite letter to your Labour MP, then please read my detailed briefing for parliamentarians, here (pdf).
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Note: If you followed the link to Jack Straw and now feel sick, I am sorry. Here is the retired Law Lord, Lord Bingham, to make you a bit better.
The splendiferous Doc Searls has an alarming article about an outfit called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium.
Global Internet Freedom Consortium sell tools to break the Great Internet Wall of China. Cool. They also sell the private details of their clients who have purchased these tools to ‘vetted’ companies for ‘personalised advertising’. Extremely un-cool… catastrophically so if one of the ‘vetted’ companies turns out to be a front for the Chinese government.
I despise most internet ‘push marketers’ at the best of times (not only does it not really work, it is intensely annoying… those two points are not unrelated) but to sell that sort of client list to any third party is just all kinds of a bad idea.
These do not sound like people I would care to trust my liberty and quite possibly my life with if I was planning to most righteously dig a hole under the Great Internet Wall. I know two people in China who do exactly that on a regular basis and this article is probably the fastest way I have to let them know about the worm in the “Global Internet Freedom Consortium’s” apple.
The moral of the story? Read the fine print when buying the tools you need to stick it to The Man… before you pull out that credit card.
The innocent have nothing [left] to lose
– The answer to the question “What was the winning tagline in the government’s competition to relaunch the ID card?”, according to The Register’s perhaps slightly satirical Christmas quiz.
Their lack of imagination will also protect them from the apprehension that they have anything to hide.
It is only people who behave suspiciously who should – and quite rightly deserve to – fear. That is the purpose of having ID cards!”
“Like my friends and acquaintances, I cannot understand how a law abiding citizen
can object to the proposal or how they will limit or infringe my “civil liberties”.
– Unnamed members of the public quoted as endorsing the Home Office view in its consultation summary (2003) (pdf).
The national identity cards scheme will give people confidence, convenience and security in an increasingly vital aspect of modern life – proving and protecting their identity.
– David Blunkett, launching the Identity Cards Bill in 2004
Such views are surprisingly persistent. To tackle them, we (NO2ID) have produced what I suppose is the first NO2ID commercial:
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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